English and Spanish Exclamatives, a comparative study of the left periphery

In the study of the left periphery, the syntax of exclamatives is often overlooked. Although research on exclamatives exists (You 2014; Villa-García 2015), comparative research, such as that of Ono & Lasnik (2006), is still even more sparse. In this paper, the left periphery of English and Spanish exclamatives will be explored. By comparing and contrasting data from the two languages, this thesis seeks to further expand upon our knowledge of the left periphery of exclamatives. Using the split CP hypothesis, first proposed by Rizzi (1997), as a framework, this paper specifically focuses on how complementizers are distributed within the left periphery of the exclamative. It explores the identification of exclamatives using the clause type’s syntactic and semantic properties as defined in Zanuttini & Portner (2003). In addition, this paper establishes that A-bar movement occurs in both English and Spanish exclamatives, while head movement occurs only in the latter. I construct data...Show moreIn the study of the left periphery, the syntax of exclamatives is often overlooked. Although research on exclamatives exists (You 2014; Villa-García 2015), comparative research, such as that of Ono & Lasnik (2006), is still even more sparse. In this paper, the left periphery of English and Spanish exclamatives will be explored. By comparing and contrasting data from the two languages, this thesis seeks to further expand upon our knowledge of the left periphery of exclamatives. Using the split CP hypothesis, first proposed by Rizzi (1997), as a framework, this paper specifically focuses on how complementizers are distributed within the left periphery of the exclamative. It explores the identification of exclamatives using the clause type’s syntactic and semantic properties as defined in Zanuttini & Portner (2003). In addition, this paper establishes that A-bar movement occurs in both English and Spanish exclamatives, while head movement occurs only in the latter. I construct data consisting of wh-exclamatives with various word orders and use native speaker input to determine whether these examples are grammatical. Based on these results I analyse the distribution of the constituents that undergo movement. The paper concludes that the syntactic structure of Spanish exclamatives can allow for topicalization and focalization, whereas that of English exclamatives cannot, and it proposes that the complementizers of English exclamatives are positioned higher than those of Spanish exclamatives without the emphatic particle que.Show less

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English and Spanish Exclamatives, a comparative study of the left periphery